Real Estate Tech News

Lemonade, the insurance startup founded by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger, has today announced a $300 million Series D financing led by the SoftBank Group, with participation from Allianz, General Catalyst, GV, OurCrowd and Thrive Capital.
Lemonade uses an AI-powered bot to digitize the insurance-buying experience for renters and home owners. Users simply download the app and answer a few questions before getting a quote, which starts at $5/month but can surely go up based on a number of factors, including how much personal property one owns.

The prolonged timeline for Britain’s exit from the European Union—now extended until Oct. 31—is dragging out the country’s real estate market malaise.
Demand for homes across the U.K. fell for the eighth straight month in March, according to the latest report from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors released Thursday. The dearth of interest from home buyers has caused sales to slow and listings to languish on the market, with the average seller waiting 19 weeks from listing to close, according to the survey of more than 300 property agents.

In a sign of how the affordable housing crisis has become a focus for presidential contenders, Sen. Kamala Harris introduced a new version of her bill to give renters a tax credit.
The new plan introduced Tuesday will give renters that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities a credit depending on their income, and allow beneficiaries to receive monthly checks from the government instead of getting it once a year through a tax refund.
Renters who make up to $125,000 a year would benefit, with those earning less getting the most support, and the credit would be capped based on the typical rent in the taxpayer’s neighborhood. Supporters say it would help rebalance a tax code that has long been weighted in favor of buying a home instead of renting.

Compass is buying Stribling & Associates, one of New York City’s last major independent brokerages, The Real Deal has learned.Financial terms were not disclosed. But the acquisition is Compass’ first major one in its hometown of New York City, and leaves the venture-backed firm with about 1,800 agents in 11 offices here.Stribling, with a reputation for tony listings on the Upper East Side, placed fifth on TRD‘s most recent ranking of residential firms in Manhattan. With just 270 agents in Manhattan, the boutique brokerage has a robust new-development marketing division and punches above its weight. It closed $1.62 billion in sell-side deals last year in the borough, according to TRD‘s analysis. It also operates a residential division for homes $5 million and up, known as Stribling Private Brokerage, which is run by Kirk Henckels.

The housing slowdown that has given hope to price-squeezed buyers, struck fear into the hearts of sellers, and captivated real estate aficionados from coast to coast appears to have taken a break. Home list prices aren't coming down, it seems—instead they reached a new all-time high as the busy spring market begins.Median list prices crossed the $300,000 mark for the first time in March, according to a recent realtor.com® report. And while annual price growth had been slowing and is even down in a few parts of the country, nationally list prices shot up 7.2% year over year in March.

Zillow Group today launched a Home Loans division, establishing another pillar of the company’s new identity of directly buying and selling homes.Zillow has been quietly originating mortgages for a few months, following the acquisition of Mortgage Lenders of America last year, but the company plans to double down with the Home Loans division. The new rebranded mortgage division will complement Zillow Offers, the company’s direct home sales operation, with a goal of streamlining and simplifying the process of buying a house. Zillow Home Loans is also a standalone business, so a customer doesn’t need to use Zillow Offers to get financing.

The embattled CEO of Wells Fargo is stepping down.Tim Sloan, who took over as chief executive of the bank in October 2016, is resigning as CEO immediately, the bank said Thursday in a release. The bank's general counsel, Allen Parker, will take over as interim CEO, and the bank is searching externally for a permanent successor.Sloan, the three-decade Wells Fargo veteran who was supposed to clean up the mess that had claimed his predecessor, had struggled to satisfy regulators' demands to overhaul the sprawling institution.

Lennar Corp. (LEN - Get Report) posted modestly weaker-than-expected first quarter earnings Wednesday as slow housing starts hit the second-largest U.S. homebuilder's bottom line even as mortgage rates eased.Lennar said earnings for the three months ended in February, the company's fiscal first quarter, came in at 74 cents a share, up 39.6% from the same period last year but 1 cent shy of the Street consensus forecast. Group revenues, Lennar said, rose 31% to $3.9 billion but fell shy of analysts' forecasts of $4.11 billion.

Offerpad, the Arizona-based real estate and technology innovator, announces the close of its successful Series C financing. The new equity funding, along with previously undisclosed debt capital from Citi late last year, brings the company’s combined equity and debt capital raised to nearly $1 billion since its start just three and a half years ago. Offerpad’s Series C was led by a new investor.Offerpad also secured funding in Q3 2018 from Citi (NYSE: C) in the form of a significant warehouse facility, the real estate tech company’s third in its nearly four-year history.

Earlier this month, HomeStreet, a community bank and mortgage lender that operates bank branches and standalone home loan centers, announced that it planned to sell off much of its entire retail mortgage operation, which includes 72 home loan centers in five states, and as nearly all of the mortgage servicing rights associated with loans originated in those retail outlets.